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Friday, 19 May 2017

This week at Valley Press, #55: 'When we were winners'

Dear readers,

This week, Valley Press won its very first literary award. Remembering Oluwale, an important and poignant collection of writing inspired by the tragedy of Leeds immigrant David Oluwale, was voted 'Best Anthology' at the 2017 Saboteur Awards. It was a moment of great satisfaction for the many contributors, including editor SJ Bradley and co-organiser Max Farrar (pictured below attending the ceremony), and of course the book's designer, our own Rosa Campbell. I was delighted too, even though my sole contribution was saying 'yes, we must publish that!' this time last year.

Sarah (SJ Bradley) had this to say shortly afterwards:

"It is so wonderful to have Remembering Oluwale recognised by the Saboteur Awards. This is a book which faces up to a shameful episode in Leeds’ history, and persuades the city to do better. David Oluwale was a man who could so easily have been forgotten – at the time of his death, the only official records left about him were the arrest records left by the police who victimisedhim, and papers from a psychiatric institution. It’s a testament to the resonances of his story that so much wonderful and powerful writing has come about and continues to do so. I am so proud to have been a part of it."

The news of our win, and subsequent reactions from the reading public, inspired me to finally finish the Kindle version of the book, which you can now access here. A half-finished file had sat on my hard drive for many months; the complexity of the formatting (with notes, and a multitude of page layouts) had discouraged me somewhat, and I was able to tell myself: 'they've got the paperback... Kindle publications are old news.' But I knuckled down on Tuesday afternoon and got the job done.

Leeds residents can attend an event celebrating Remembering Oluwale on Wednesday June 7th at Outlaws Yacht Club, from 7.15. This also seems an ideal time to announce that some of the team behind the anthology(including SJ) are lauching a new project along similar lines; a competition which leads to an anthology in support of a good cause. Entries aren't open yet, but you can read the details in the left-hand column here. We'll be publishing the resulting book in March 2018.

As promised, here are Sarah and Max at the Saboteur ceremony:

The other big news this week is that we have a new website. Not entirely-from-scratch new, but built 'on top of' our previous website by original designers Askew Brook.

As well as new functionality – you can now contact a department directly, and audiobooks and hardbacks can be listed alongside paperbacks – it has a new design. Less big blocks of turquoise, more white space, and we can now choose an 'accent colour' for each book, as well as upload a second image (which will sometimes be the back cover, sometimes an object photo).

You can see the new design firing on all cylinders on the Remembering Oluwale page (if you haven't already visited that by now!) It'll be a while before we've added the new images and colours to every book, but we'll get there eventually.

I hope you approve of the new site; these changes all came about by talking to VP fans over the last twelve months, so I'm hoping this version of the site will last us a good few years. If you have any feedback, or spot a bug, let us know.

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Helen Burke update: we're very close to finishing the "primary typesetting" (a process I described last week). Tomorrow could be the day!

And finally, for those who missed Norah Hanson's reading last night at Wardle & Jones, our latest intrepid intern Rebecca has edited and uploaded a video of her poem 'Spark', which you can watch here. Enjoy!